I have been publishing on LinkedIn a new feature a week for the past 3-4 months or so. It’s hard to stay consistent but there’s enough innovation happening at Isovalent and on Cilium that I am rarely out of inspiration to create these posts.
LinkedIn posts are not easily searchable and indexable so I will be publishing these little nuggets on this blog too.
Let’s start with the first one:
It’s a small change but 1) as a network engineer, I get really excited about this type of stuff and 2) there’s been many users asking for this feature.
As you may know, Cilium natively supports BGP. You can establish BGP peering between Cilium-managed Kubernetes nodes and any BGP device – typically a Top-of-Rack switch – and advertise your Kubernetes Pod CIDRs and Service IPs to the rest of your network.
What we didn’t have until now is a way to check the status of the BGP connection (you’d have to log in to the other side of the BGP session to find out).
With this enhancement to the Cilium CLI, you can now run cilium bgp peers and find out the BGP session status, how routes are advertised and received, etc… You can also get the output in JSON.
I’ll be adding this in the two Cilium BGP hands-on labs as soon as I can.
The irony is that – 18 years in my networking career, I still get excited by running BGP CLI commands. I’m so sad. 😂
nicovibert.com 